


Vampire Overhead!

by jouissant



Category: Anno Dracula Series - Kim Newman, Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Blood Drinking, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining, Vampire angst, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-22 08:52:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9598160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: Lewis Nixon hadn't been warm in five years, but he hadn't quite missed it until Bastogne.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> I discovered Anno Dracula via your Yuletide letter and I was thrilled when we matched for Chocolate Box. An alternate history of Lewis Nixon immediately seemed appropriate. I really hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. Happy Valentine's Day!!
> 
> Title derived from _Vampires Overhead_ , a 1935 pulp novel that is sadly not about undead paratroopers. Space vampires are good too, I GUESS.

_"In 1943, it had been expedient for the Allies to come to a dark accommodation. It had taken Edwin Winthrop to negotiate the Croglin Grange Treaty, which brought the King Vampire into the war. […] Even Churchill, detesting Dracula as he did Hitler, went along with the alliance, though he never shook the count's hand." — Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha_

***

Lewis Nixon hadn't been warm in five years, but he hadn't quite missed it until Bastogne.

It wasn't on account of his own discomfort. Lew didn't give much of a shit about himself—never had, which if you got Freudian about it was probably part and parcel of why he'd ended up in a back alley off Times Square, baring his neck to eternity. At the time the move had seemed inevitable; Lew ran in wild circles, in a crowd of Astors and Rockefellers, and if Nixon money had carried a little less patina nobody had seemed to notice through the blood-and-champagne haze. Back then everyone was turning, and the ones who hadn't were only waiting for the right time, the perfect parent-in-darkness. He remembered the morning his sister had stumbled in, hung over and sunburned and giddy, and lifted up her hair to show him a bruised set of fang-marks at her throat.

"So you've gone and done it," he'd said, and she'd grinned and flashed her teeth at him.

"Your turn now, Lewis," Blanche said in a sing-song. "Daddy will hate it."

In the end he couldn't stand the thought of any sort of vetting process. Quibbling over the various vampire bloodlines was beginning to sound to him like breeding racehorses, or trying to decide the most fashionable place to summer. So it was with an air of the blasé that Lew went out walking late one night, after several fortifying drinks in a bar off of 42nd Street, and allowed himself to be pressed up against a rough brick wall without even the appearance of a fight.

The shadow that loomed over him was a man's, which Lew thought was appropriate. There was garbage strewn around their feet, a strong odor of piss and rotting vegetables. He thought of his sister, who'd probably received the Dark Kiss supine on someone's bedroom divan, and managed to feel snidely, deprecatingly superior. Then the vampire set his mouth to Lew's pulse and he felt everything, all at once, and then nothing at all.

It was only later that Lew began to wonder if perhaps he hadn't been a little hasty, a little careless, if the threads of regret he could already feel creeping through his veins in place of living blood meant that he'd been reborn wrong somehow. He looked around at his contemporaries and thought he ought to be too young to feel anything but blood-hungry and heady with promise. He was a Nixon now in name only; he owed filial allegiance to one or another of the great vampire dynasties. His roll of the dice meant that only time would reveal which, reveal whether or not his father-in-darkness had, in fact, been ill-chosen.

He'd been in town all day at HQ, keeping out of the thin sun—though it barely cut through the clouds enough to matter—and commandeering a ride out to the line just as night was falling. The jumpy private who drove him kept shooting looks at Lew out of the corner of his eye like he thought Lew would try and grab the wheel, steer them into a snowbank and tear his throat out. Joke's on him, thought Lew. He was more likely to shake the kid down for a pack of Luckies, to say nothing of his winter coat and first aid kit.

"Here's good," Lew said. A little further off the line than he'd have liked, but Lew was beginning to feel bad for him.

"Yessir," said the driver, not bothering to hide his relief. When Lew had alighted he saluted crisply, and wasted no time turning the Jeep around.

Lew sighed, shoved his hands in his pockets, and tromped off through the snow toward the treeline.

He could've joined a vampire division, spared himself the wide-eyed looks from warm country bumpkins who'd never seen a vampire in the flesh. After the treaty at Croglin Grange back in '43, when Lew was still at Toccoa, he'd been approached by the Intelligence Service to join a dark division based out of London. They were helping integrate the Allied forces with Dracula's displaced rabble, summarily booted out of the Carpathians by the vampire clause in Hitler's Final Solution.

Vital work, really, and necessary to help air out the stink of collaboration that hung about Vlad Tepes and all his kin, that had wafted across the Atlantic to taint even Lew in the eyes of certain of his warm brothers-in-arms. You could try to explain to Herbert Sobel 'til you were blue in the face that an Upper West Side Yalie _nosferatu_ had no closer ties to the Fatherland than an appreciation for Beethoven and Brahms, but you'd still find yourself doubletiming Currahee in the wee hours, racing the dawn back to barracks.

The fact of the matter was that too long among his own kind wore at Lew after awhile. Maybe that was yet another sign of low breeding, or maybe it was just the fact that, by the time he made it out of OCS, he'd found himself with other reasons to stay among the truly living.

He found Dick at the company CP, in basically the same position he'd left him in twelve or so hours earlier. He looked terrible, his nose red and running, his face bone-white to match the fresh wet snow that bowed the tarp forming the CP's roof. He nodded at Lew as he approached, though he was shaking so hard the gesture was difficult to discern.

"How's tricks?" Lew asked him.

"Oh, fine," Dick said, his teeth chattering. "Little chilly."

Lew sat beside him. "Yeah." He took up Dick's gloved hands and rubbed them in both of his, wishing not for the first time that he had some body heat to transfer. He saw Dick cast an eye around him. There was no one there, and even if there had been, personal space as a concept had long since eroded here.

"Quiet today?" Lew asked.

"Yeah. Lucky. They've had a hell of a time out there, Nix."

Lew sighed. "No kidding."

"What's the word from headquarters?" Dick asked.

"Not much," Lew said. "But rumor has it another supply drop might be incoming in the next couple of days."

"God, please," Dick said. From his lips the words were a prayer. He sighed, the outflow of his breath sending him into another fit of shivering. Lew held Dick's hands up to his mouth and huffed a breath out onto his frozen fingers. Lew didn't always think to breathe, but now he figured whatever air was housed in his creaky and underused lungs must be warmer than outside.

"Hey, I had a wire from Harry," Lew said. "He addressed it to the both of us."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, it was pretty concise. 'Just a flesh wound. Don't take Berlin without me.'"

Dick snorted. "You eat?" he asked Lew, so casually that Lew thought he must have forgotten. But then they'd known one another for long enough that it was possible that to Dick Lew's diet had by now become just another ration allotment to consider.

"Nah, they were fresh out."

Sometimes there was cow's blood to be had up at Regiment, but livestock was running just as thin on the ground as everything else, and Lew couldn't think of the last time he'd been properly sated.

"If it wasn't for the goddamn Geneva Convention I could nip across the line and snag myself a kraut," he said. "One less of them for us to worry about. And anyway, Hitler would have me drawn and quartered with silver chains, so I don't see why I can't—"

"Nix," Dick interjected softly. He looked troubled, either by Lew's bad taste or the thought of him draining a man.

"Sorry," Lew said, licking his lips.

Dick sighed. As Lew watched he took his glove off and pushed his sleeve up, proffering his wrist. His skin was pale in the waning light save the bruises blooming over the artery.

"No," Lew said immediately. "We said we were going to stop."

"You've got to eat just like I do," Dick said.

"Not every damn day. And besides, I see what you get to eat around here. Half a cup of beans isn't exactly making me green with envy."

Dick made a frustrated noise. "That's not the point," he said. "It's been four days since the last time. You look—"

"What, like death warmed over? Well, Dick, I've got some bad news for you."

"Please," Dick said. "I'm offering. I—I want to." 

Lew shook his head furiously, torn between hunger and embarrassment and irritation that Dick had wasted time keeping track of Lew on top of his already mile-long list of worries. He should've lied about it, told Dick he'd got his fill in town. Anyway, he was used to the parched, staticky feeling of constant red thirst. It made his skin feel tight, his throat dry, but he had days yet before it grew truly unbearable.

"I'll go and see Doc," Lew said, sounding feeble to his own ears.

They both knew he wouldn't. There wasn't enough blood or plasma up at the aid station in the first place, and that was for the wounded, not peckish vampires who'd had the bright idea to ship off to war with a mostly-warm company. Lew wouldn't dream of asking Roe to open a vein for him, even if he could theoretically give the medic an order to do just that. That was how the vampire divisions operated, anyway. He shivered, fingers fumbling in his coat pocket for a cigarette. They were a holdover from the old days, the last one now that his stomach couldn't take drink any more. They tasted worse than he remembered.

"Lew, come on. You'd do it for me."

"If I were warm I'd be so shitfaced drunk you wouldn't want my blood anyway," Lew said, but he took Dick's hand where he'd lain it in his lap, rubbing a thumb over his wrist. He could feel the pulse beating tauntingly beneath the skin, and he knew with a flare of shame that he wouldn't be able to say no.

"Dick," he murmured.

"We'll stop when we get resupplied," Dick said.

"We should never have started." Lew tossed his cigarette and ground it into the dirt floor of the CP. Then he got to his feet, dropping Dick's hand. "Not here."

They ducked into Lew's foxhole, the one he'd dug out deep and wide enough for two on the assumption that every third night or so he'd be able to coax Dick out of the CP to share it with him. Lew yanked the tarp over the top of the hole and settled back against the frozen wall. Dick tucked in next to him and Lew thought with a surprising degree of bitterness that he'd be sorry to see the last of this place if only for the physical closeness he'd managed to scam on a near-nightly basis. Damn the blood, Lew thought. Give him Dick curled up at his side and let him fade from the world altogether without tasting another drop.

Lew loved Dick. He knew that as surely as he did his own name. He also knew that Dick loved him back in his quiet way, and that perhaps this was the reason regret had whispered in Lew's ear every night since Times Square. The universe had foreseen Dick somehow and had chosen Lew as the recipient of some cosmic lesson in cruelty. Or maybe it was simple punishment. He'd believe that readily enough.

Dick craned his neck. It made a pleasing white line in the low light. He pulled his collar to one side. "You could always—"

"Jesus, no," Lew said quickly. "Do you want me to kill you?"

"I just thought it'd be more efficient." Dick swallowed.

"It would be. That's exactly why the wrist is safer," Lew said, raking a hand back through his hair.

Dick readjusted his collar and offered Lew his wrist again. "Here, then," he said.

Lew took a deep breath. He laid Dick's hand in his, palm to dorsum, and laced their fingers together, flexing his wrist lightly so the veins stood out blue and prominent just beneath the surface of his skin. With his other hand he pushed Dick's sleeve back. He wanted to kiss Dick's wrist; he very nearly did, but he stopped himself, certain that the gesture would be too damning.

"I'm sorry," he said instead. "I know it hurts."

"It's okay," Dick said. "Just do it."

Lew curled his lips back and set his fangs against Dick's skin, over the faint marks he'd left behind last time. It would be quick; he wouldn't have to grope around for the artery. He drank from a nurse once who'd taught him the best way to find it. He sank his teeth in, slipping through Dick's skin as a knife through soft butter. Dick gasped, and Lew withdrew, lapped at the first gush of hot blood. Then he latched his mouth over the twin punctures and began to suck.

Nature, or whatever unnatural force had made Dracula and his ilk, had done their mortal prey one great service. Feeding was just as pleasurable for Dick as it was for Lew, though Dick was so tight-lipped about matters of the flesh that Lew got the impression he'd almost rather white-knuckle through some agonizing trial than actually enjoy the process.

The first time Dick offered Lew his blood he had done so with the utmost pragmatism. Lew had been sick with thirst and hiding it badly, and Dick had fussed as though Lew had a fever, or pneumonia, or some other genuine ailment. Lew had tried to talk him out of it and failed, or given up, or both. It wasn't until Lew was poised to bite, Dick's face screwed up against anticipated pain, that Lew realized that he ought to be warned about what was going to happen.

"It's—it'll feel good," he'd stammered, embarrassed, and Dick's eyes had flown open in what looked like horror.

"What do you mean?" he'd asked furiously, as if after everything it was the thought of taking pleasure in the act that was a bridge too far. But even then he hadn't declined, so Lew set to out of a desire to get it over with.

Dick watched him bite, that first time, and Lew would never forget the way his face looked when Lew's teeth broke the skin.

Things were always awkward for a few days after Lew fed. Dick went back to spending his nights in the CP and cutting Lew a wide berth in the mornings, as though they'd had some drunken indiscretion he wanted to forget about. Lew shook his head at the irony. He'd never have the chance to take Dick to bed properly; even if Dick wanted Lew for a lover in earnest, Lew's interest in good old-fashioned warm sex had all but evaporated. Served him right, he thought, to be reduced to this: mouth fastened to Dick's wrist, glutting himself on his blood in a mockery of human intimacy.

In the foxhole now Dick cried out shamelessly. Maybe it was the thick dirt walls that gave him leave to be so loud, the loam soaking up his noises like bread and gravy. He let himself fall backwards. Lew kept hold of his arm. He felt alive like this in a way he rarely did otherwise, electrified from head to toe, and he might feel bad about using Dick this way but hell if he was going to let it go. Not for the first time he thought he understood why so many of his kind had given themselves over to lives of sloth and hedonism, looking only so far as the next ripe body. He lowered himself over Dick, vaguely aware of the way Dick arched against him, and he did kiss Dick's wrist then, pursing his lips against the broken skin. He filled his mouth until his cheeks were taut as wineskins, until blood seeped around his teeth, and then he choked it down the quicker to begin all over again.

Dick's mouth hung open, jaw lax, and Lew could see his eyes moving beneath the lids skittish as rabbits, as though he was asleep and dreaming.

Lew shut his own eyes, and the darkness behind them was red.

***

He woke up to a belly full of blood. The foxhole reeked of it, and Lew wondered idly if he'd had too much and thrown up in his stupor. He belched. He'd had more tonight than he had in a very long time, and he felt wonderful, as if he'd slept for a week. It took him a solid few minutes, after rolling onto his back feeling like a gorged python, to recall that there was, in fact, someone beside him from whom the meal had originated. Lew blinked slowly.

Dick was talking, was saying Lew's name with a peculiar softness, as though he thought he was speaking louder than he was. Lew sat up and looked at him.

"Hey," he said. "Are you—"

Dick was cradling his wrist, muttering something to himself. Lew leaned closer and sniffed, and as he did so he could smell fresh blood, see the wet gleam of it. Dick was still bleeding. Far too much so.

"It won't stop," Dick said, his voice thin.

Lew felt a jolt of nausea at the thought of Dick lying here while he slept off his meal, futilely trying to wake him and losing blood all the while. He reached for Dick's hand, thinking to get a closer look, and Dick flinched, drawing back as though afraid.

"Let me," Lew said, feeling stung.

"Sorry, sorry," Dick said.

Lew took Dick's arm carefully. What he saw horrified him. Vampire consorts sometimes asked to be marked, bore their scars with particular pride, but what Lew had left Dick with was no delicate brace of fang marks, no pearly cicatrices to be coyly displayed. He had worried Dick's wrist, bitten him over and over. Lew shook his head. He couldn't remember doing it.

"Christ," Lew said. "Dick—"

"S'okay," Dick said.

"It's _not,_ " Lew countered, as though they were having some sort of logical argument. "Come on, up," he said. "We've gotta find a medic."

"No," Dick protested, sounding groggy. "I want to go to sleep."

"Like hell," Lew said, rolling up onto the balls of his feet. Dick tended to get sleepy afterwards, but whether his somnolence was down to blood loss or simply refractory Lew didn't know and wasn't going to chance. He grabbed Dick under either armpit and hauled him upright, clutching him to his side with one hand and jerking back their tarp roof with the other, thanking God or Dracula or whoever for his blood-bolstered strength.

"Up you go," he said, as if Dick were a child, and hoisted him over the lip of the foxhole. 

Lew crawled out after him, picking Dick up again where he'd slumped in the snow, the blood dripping dauntlessly from his wound. He slung Dick's good arm over his shoulder and set out half carrying him, thinking wildly that if there were any lawless _nosferatu_ in these woods they might as well be setting out a trail of breadcrumbs. But if there had been vampires living here, like as not they'd gone the way of the birds and deer and foxes, scared up and flushed out by tanks and heavy artillery.

He thought of yelling for Doc, but if he did half the company would come running, and when Dick got back in his right mind he'd never forgive him. He found Roe's foxhole soon enough, and hoped like hell the man had gotten it together since the night Harry got hit.

As it turned out, he had, and as such he turned on Lew with the full force of his clinical disdain. "Jesus Christ," he said, when Lew tried to stammer out the circumstances. "Were you trying to turn him?"

"Of course not," Lew said, abashed.

"Get him down in here," Roe said, helping Dick into the foxhole. "Easy there, Cap." 

"You're covered in his blood, you know," Roe said conversationally, looking up at Lew. Lew touched his face absently. Sure enough, there was a beard of dried gore flaking over his chin. His cheeks were itchy with it. He hadn't noticed until now.

"Don't just stand there," Roe said. "Get down and gimme some cover for this torch."

He flapped the edge of his tarp at Lew, who crouched by the foxhole and held the tarpaulin up to obscure the light Roe shone on Dick's injury. Lew waited with bated breath; if he still had a heartbeat he imagined he'd have felt it pounding in his ears. He could hear Roe talking quietly to Dick, Dick answering back. Presently the light went out and Roe peered out from under the tarp.

"Bleeding's slowing down. Sulfa helped. You chewed him up pretty bad," he said.

Lew swallowed. "You want to me to call for a Jeep?"

"Nah, I think he's just out of it, and I think I can dress the wrist. But I need your help, yeah?"

"Yeah, okay."

Lew crawled into the foxhole, which might have been big enough for the three of them if he and Dick had been as slight as Roe. "Goddammit," he muttered, feeling as though his elbows were everywhere, his knees around his ears. Dick was limp as a rag doll, nodding as though he might drop off to sleep at any moment. At any rate, he didn't seem capable of repositioning himself, so Lew sighed and wedged himself between Dick's back and the wall of the foxhole, pulling Dick back against his chest. Roe had folded a piece of cloth and had clearly enlisted Dick to apply pressure himself, with mixed results.

"Lew," Dick said. He sounded drunk and unhappy.

"Shush," Lew said. "We're going to fix you up, okay?"

Roe pulled the tarp back over them and turned the flashlight on. "You're lucky I scrounged some bandages," he said. He handed the light to Lew. "Hold this and help me get his coat off."

When the wound was bare again and sufficiently lit Roe prodded at the countless punctures and gave a long, low whistle. "Thought you were a prince of darkness, not a damned rabid dog."

"I'm no prince of anything," Lew said. "And it was an accident." Roe broke open a vial of mercurochrome and upended it onto Dick's arm. Dick gasped and stiffened.

"Shouldn't he get some morphine?"

"Can't," said Roe. "I'm afraid it'll tank his blood pressure, then he'll really be sunk." He shook his head. "You came damn near to turning him over."

Bloodletting alone wouldn't have turned Dick; he'd have needed a drink of whatever ran brackish through Lew's veins for that. But near enough. "You know much about vampires?" Lew asked.

"Some. I got friends. Used to run up to New Orleans sometimes. I've seen some things."

"Yeah, I'll bet," Lew said.

"Treated enough bites since I joined up. When these boys go out on the town they can't seem to keep themselves to themselves." Roe daubed at the mercurochrome and laid a cut square of gauze over the top. The liquid came through right away, umber like old blood. "How long's he been doing this for you?"

Lew sighed. "Since we left Mourmelon. Not every day. I won't let him. And it hasn't been…like this. Like I said, it was an accident. I got carried away."

"Sure," Roe said evenly, leaving Lew to turn the word over in his own brain, match it up with what he thought Roe might or might not suspect. He felt sure it must be obvious. A guy didn't suck his buddy's blood. He sacked up and gritted his teeth and waited 'til he could find a whore or some farmer's daughter to enthrall, or—

"You come see me from now on," Roe said quietly. "We'll work it out between us. Quick and easy, and sterile. You know what kind of germs you got in your mouth, sir?"

Lew ran his tongue over his teeth and stayed quiet. Dick had grown heavier against him, and if not for the wet, slow huff of his breath against Lew's collar he'd have been worried. 

"There we are," Roe said, fixing the bandage in place. "You make him come and get that changed every day. And don't take no for an answer, hear me? I already know you can carry him if you've gotta."

"Hell, you ever tried to get him to do something he doesn't want to do? Dracula himself couldn't take Dick Winters alive. Lucky for me he was subdued."

Roe patted Dick's arm, and Dick shifted in Lew's arms. "Yeah," said Roe. "Lucky. Here, let's get his coat back on."

"Thank you," Lew said as he adjusted the coat. "For helping."

Roe shifted uncomfortably. "I'm just doing my job, sir."

"You'd have been well within your rights to toss me to the MPs," Lew said roughly. "Assaulting an officer. Turning a man without his consent." He was clutching at Dick's forearm, he realized. On the good side. Roe couldn't not see it.

"You didn't," Roe said.

"By the skin of my damn teeth," Lew said, with a bitter laugh. "I don't know, Eugene. Maybe you still ought to. Maybe I ought to do it myself."

He'd be court-martialed, Lew thought, and that was the best case scenario. Several of his brethren were up at Regiment, and they might take it upon themselves to punish him in the old ways. Flayed with silver bayonets, staked in the open at dawn. There was all manner of creative means by which to dispose of him, or at least make him very, very uncomfortable.

Roe snorted. "He wakes up and finds out I did some harebrained thing like that, it'll be both our asses. He needs you here, and that means Easy needs you here. You think the fellas don't know you could be bunking in a real billet somewhere instead of running yourself ragged back and forth?"

"I—"

"Besides, some of the guys say it's good luck, having a vampire around. Scares the krauts away. Get Liebgott to tell you his joke about a Jew, a vampire, and Hitler walking into a bar."

Lew winced, fairly sure he didn't want to know. "Well, maybe I'll stick around after all. But anyway, I meant what I said. Thanks, Doc."

"Ain't nothing. Sir." Roe whacked Lew lightly on the leg. "You get some shuteye, huh?"

"What, here?"

"Sure. He's sacked out. I got somewhere else I can go. I'll leave my canteen; when he wakes up he'll be thirsty. Give him all you can—he needs it. But slow. And don't let him get too cold." He gave them a measured look, as though taking in their position for the first time.

Lew gathered Dick against him a little tighter. He raised an eyebrow. "This good?"

Roe didn't blink. "Yeah," he said. "Like that."

***

Lew didn't sleep. He drifted instead, trying to imagine what he'd be doing back home if there'd never been a war, or if he'd decided to try and get out of going. Vampires had been exempt from the draft until the war broke out, and even then it wouldn't have taken much to get listed 4-F.

There was a vampire doctor at the enlistment office in Trenton where he had his physical who'd looked from his clipboard to Lew and back, one fang tucked thoughtfully over his lip. Lew could tell right away that he was old. Older than Lew when he'd turned, to be sure; at a glance he appeared to be about fifty, but there was an air of the crypt about him that smelled ancient in an entirely different way. His face was greenish, powdered white for effect, and his eyes and lips were the color of raw liver.

"Are you certain about this?" the doctor asked, and at the time Lew had been indignant.

"Of course," he said.

In retrospect he guessed it had been a little romantic. After Pearl he'd thought of nothing but the Great War, the vampire aces who'd flown through dark of night to fell the Bloody Red Baron. A boy's dream of a war that was over before he was born, and looking back that doctor must have known it.

"It's a human folly," the doctor droned, casually as if he were discussing the weather. "It'll be over in a blink; might as well save yourself the headache."

Lew frowned. He still felt human, if he was being honest. Maybe that was his trouble. "How?" he asked. 

The doctor nibbled on the end of his fountain pen. "I can say you're psychically unfit. That you can't be trusted. That you might go wild and rip somebody's throat out." And he said _that_ as though he was offering up a prize.

"No thanks," Lew said, struggling to keep his voice even.

That very morning his father had suggested he stay on as foreman of the nitration works, provided they could spin the position into one 'essential to national defense.' As it turned out, an undead son hadn't been quite the scandal Lew's sister had predicted; Stanhope Nixon managed to keep his claws in tighter than ever now he could measure Lew's future at the company in millenia. As far as Lew was concerned, it was all the more reason to enlist.

The doctor shrugged, and signed Lew's form in sanguine ink. "Suit yourself," he said. "But if I may say so, you seem awfully young."

In the foxhole Dick stirred against him, the crown of his head brushing against Lew's mouth. Lew could smell him: oily scalp, sour old sweat, and underneath the ever-present sweetness of blood. The odor dragged at him, his mouth watering, physical hunger enmeshed with desire in a way he'd never be able to put words to. Nor would he ever be free of it, and Dick—well, Lew was pretty well sure Dick deserved better.

Dick sat up then, fumbling blindly in the dark and bashing his bad wrist against the side of the hole. He cried out and flailed, fighting Lew as he patted his shoulders, his chest, not sure whether he was trying to settle him or wake him up.

"Hey," Lew said. "Hey, hey. You're all right."

"Nix?"

"Yeah, it's me."

"I'm all right?"

"Yeah, you're all right."

"I fell asleep," Dick said, settling back against Lew's chest.

"You passed out. You—you lost some blood."

"Oh. Did we—"

"Yeah," Lew said.

Dick coughed. "Oh." He ran a hand over the wadded gauze at his wrist, protruding from the sleeve of his overcoat. "What happened?"

"Your wrist wouldn't stop bleeding," Lew said. "I brought you to Doc and he patched you up."

Dick took a deep breath. "What'd he say about it?"

"Oh, basically told me in no uncertain terms what I damned fool I am," Lew said. He was aiming for breezy and failing miserably; even as he spoke he was sure nothing could ever be breezy in a place like this. "I imagine it wasn't too far off the time Moose got shot."

Dick huffed weakly. "He's insubordinate," he said, though Lew thought he sounded more amused than anything.

"I can't blame him, frankly. Wouldn't you get sick to death of patching up a bunch of idiots who're supposed to be above your pay grade?"

"You're not an idiot," Dick said.

"I could've killed you," Lew said. "Or—or made you…like me." He sighed. He wasn't sure which was worse. "Anyway, we can't do it anymore. It's been—good of you to help. But it's not safe."

"So what'll you do?"

"Doc said he'd fix me up. And we'll get out of here soon enough, right? I could be barhopping in Paris by Valentine's Day, for all you know. I'll have mademoiselles rolling up their sleeves left and right."

Dick stiffened. When he spoke his voice sounded even, nearly normal. It was only because Lew held him that he knew Dick was tight as a bowstring. "How?"

"How what?"

"How's he going to fix you up?"

"Dunno," Lew said. "But sterile, he said. So no, um. No biting."

Abruptly Dick squirmed around to face him, to clutch the front of Lew's coat in his good hand. His mouth was very close to Lew's mouth. Lew had keen night vision nowadays, but even without he'd have marked the way Dick's lips parted on a gust of breath like woodsmoke in the chill air. Dick sniffed. Lew's arms were still around his waist.

"You'll start bleeding again," Lew said, but Dick ignored him, only wormed his hand up between their bodies and ran his thumb along the swell of Lew's bottom lip. Lew could smell the blood under his nails.

"Dick," Lew said.

Dick slipped his thumb into Lew's mouth. The taste of dried blood like sour wine—rusty, scabby, and then he pricked the pad of his thumb on the razor-sharp point of Lew's right fang. Dick made no sound besides a quick hiss of breath. Lew palmed the back of his neck, thinking to draw him back, but his hand seemed to fall of its own volition. All he did, in the end, was run his tongue over Dick's thumb in his mouth, tease it, let its fresh issue pool and slide down his throat.

Dick moaned and dropped his head again. He brushed his lips against Lew's neck, and Lew found himself moving instinctively to bare it the way Dick had earlier.

"I want," Dick started. He shook his head. Lew could hear him thinking. He wanted many things, it seemed: for the war to be over, and the men to be safe, and for Lew to be happy. Others too, stickier and stranger. He wanted to put his tongue in Lew's mouth. He wanted Lew to touch him while he drank. Of note, he did not want Roe to fix Lew up. 

He thought he knew the things Lew wanted, or some of them anyway, and he wondered what it said about him that he wanted badly to give them to him. He wondered what it would be like to live forever, and if he could square it, square all this messy, private desire with the part of him that wanted simply to do his best.

At the moment, he wanted to bite Lew's neck.

How would it be, Lew thought, if they could drink from one another just once? A bloody _soixante-neuf_ , one Lew would love so much he might die of it all over again. Certainly Dick would, and once they'd done it they would doom themselves to a thousand lifetimes of remembering. Perhaps they'd both go mad, chasing the ghosts of their mortal selves through the centuries. Since that day in the enlistment office Lew had met a score of ancient vampires. Perhaps a handful had been sane.

But now Dick wasn't thinking of the long run. In a moment he would ask. Lew could taste the question already. Lew would take a breath and steel himself, and when he answered he would say—


End file.
